"Thaaat's what I'm talking about!"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I too have heard it a number of times, but OED hasn't. I certainly
never heard it in NYC.

The idiom's distinction comes from the fact that the speaker need not
have been talking at all.

JL

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Thaaat's what I'm talking about!"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 3:26 PM, will salmon wrote:
>>
>> On Oct 27, 2011, at 2:19 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>> >
>> > There's a current TV commercial in which B.B. King says this.
>> >
>> > Contextually it can only mean, "Yes, indeed, I think that's really great!"
>> >
>> > AAVE?
>>
>> I've said this for years, and I am a native speaker of Texican.
>
> Seems unremarkable to me, too -- I feel like I've heard it in a
> hundred movies. Earliest relevant example I can find from a quick
> search of IMDb's quote repository is from Will Smith in "Men in Black"
> (1997):
>
> Zed: Kay, give the kid a weapon.
> [Kay opens a chest filled with intergalactic guns. He picks up a large rifle]
> Kay: A Series Four De-atomizer.
> Jay: That's what I'm talkin' about.
>
> Eddie Murphy said it in his standup movie "Raw" but not in the
> intended idiomatic fashion -- though he did use it in relevant way in
> "Mulan" (1998) and "I Spy" (2002). More recent examples come from Sam
> Worthington in "Avatar" (2009) and Steve Carrell in "Despicable Me"
> (2010).
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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